


to god alone we kneel

by ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes



Series: move forward (there is nothing for you here) [4]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Azula is only kinda here, Depression, Dissociation, Flower Language, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I mean it's Zuko, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Lake Laogai, Non-Linear Narrative, Order of the White Lotus, Past Character Death, The Dai Li (Avatar), Very Earth Kingdom-y, White Lotus Zuko, many trigger warnings, more pretentious poetry stuff, most non linear narrative to ever non linear, so much fucking flower language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:14:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24903649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes/pseuds/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes
Summary: Ba Sing Se got him when he was two years into banishment and so close to citizenship it burned his fingertips. Burned them more than they burned last summer, with shaking hands and a half-remembered prayer.If Zuko dies, he will die Earth Kingdom, and his grave will be covered in flowers.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: move forward (there is nothing for you here) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1379986
Comments: 13
Kudos: 389





	to god alone we kneel

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the way that we rust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16635386) by [r_astra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/r_astra/pseuds/r_astra). 



> The title is from Alone and Far Removed by Audie Murphy.
> 
> I've wanted to write White Lotus!Zuko (Or, in this case, former White Lotus!Zuko) for so long now.
> 
> Enjoy the angst.

_"In_ _death I can remember how she came  
_ _To kiss me while I slept; still I can share  
_ _The glee of childhood; and the fleeting gloom  
_ _When all my flowers were washed with rain of tears."  
_ _\- The Last Meeting, Siegfried Sassoon_

Some nights, he dreams of Azula.

Zuko sleeps, curled up on hard rock, hunger seeping into his bones, and he dreams of his sister. He thinks she is haunting him, her cold eyes glistening in the low lamp-light. Her smile pulls scars into the corners of her mouth, and when she speaks, blood drips onto her teeth.

Most nights though, he doesn't dream at all.

Tonight he dreamt of fire. Of big hands and scorch marks and the ash-taste on his tongue that, to this day, will not let him breathe.

He wakes up with blood in his mouth. He bit his tongue in his sleep. Again.

He paces.

-

Ba Sing Se got him when he was two years into banishment and so close to citizenship that it burned his fingertips. Burned them more than they burned after his first arrest last Summer, with shaking hands and a half-remembered prayer.

They didn't recognize him until the Bounty Hunter told them to. Until she dragged Zuko before them, hair in her fist, older and longer but no less Fire Nation then his wanted poster promised.

All those songs Uncle used to sing about the happy people in Ba Sing Se were bullshit, Zuko decides. This is the loneliest place in the world.

-

They put him in a tiny cell, deep underground, and try to starve the Fire Nation out of him.

Zuko nearly laughs.

They never seem to realize that there is nothing of that sort inside him left to starve.

-

The day he lost his Fire Bending was the day he sat down to play a game of Pai Sho. It wasn't the first time they had played, but Zuko could not remember the last.

The man spread his hands with the White Lotus flower. Inside Zuko's chest, something bloomed. Opened. Began to breathe. He thinks, if it was anything, it was Bishop's Lace. He could feel the Fire die. He did not try to warm it.

If he had, he might have killed the thing sprouting in its ashes.

-

He remembers the day they left him on the docks. His bag digging a divot in his hand and his swords strapped to his side and his bandages, pressing into his wound. He remembers the blood in his chest as the boat pulled away from the Earth Kingdom port. Remembers how it trickled down his lungs and dripped off his melting ribs, corrosive and angry and sad. Pooled in his stomach, hot and heavy and eating through his skin.

He does not know where the blood went, then. He does not know if he wants to.

Goodbye, Fire Nation.

_Goodbye, Zuko._

_(Goodbye. Goodbye.)_

-

They place him, at the start, in a normal-sized cell with a hole in the door for food, and a rusty barred window looking out onto the world.

The first time he sees food, it is a small bowl of rice, and the guard kicks it over before Zuko can eat. The rice spills on the floor. Zuko doesn't move.

The guard looks at him like he expects Zuko to do something. To cry, or scream, or eat the rice off of the floor like the cat-dog they all think he is.

Zuko does not.

Uncle's voice echoes in his head, "The wind may howl as long as it likes, but the mountain cannot bow to it."

Zuko will not be so easily cracked. He is more Earth then they could possibly know.

He smiles and it devours his face whole, like the curling edges of wanted posters in bonfires. The guard grabs a fistful of Zuko's hair and yanks when the teeth start to show.

-

The time he burned off his fingertips comes to mind as the tall man holds his wrist.

Zuko smiles in his scar tissue. Smiling with his lips is too dangerous, these days.

The gardener was the one who convinced him, though he's sure she didn't mean it. "Fingerprints aren't worth their trouble." She fed the blaze with posters of both of their faces, the colour of her voice lost to the crackle of embers. "If you ever get caught again, they'll know who you are."

He misses the sound of her, the tumbling letters falling from her mouth, like pebbles down a cliffside. He wishes he could say her name, if only because she deserves it. But his lungs fill up with hyacinths, and he can't seem to find the word.

-

The man's name is Long Feng, Zuko finds out, some time into his prison sentence.

It's a stupid name.

-

The first time he eats, he throws it up. Too much food. His stomach has been empty for too many days.

One of the guards kicks him in the thigh as he kneels, asks if he is going to be sick again. There is vomit in his hair.

Zuko tries to swat him off and fails.

They cut off all his hair, the first haircut he's had since his phoenix tail went tumbling into the ocean off the side of a Fire Nation ship, and he doesn't cry until they leave.

Then, he sobs. He isn't quite sure why.

The tears trickle off his face. Dripping down, down, down. He wonders where they're going.

 _Goodbye, Zuko,_ they say as they land.

_Goodbye._

-

He first met the White Lotus on the edge of nowhere precisely. It might have been a small town or a big city or an empty stretch of desert, for all it mattered.

It was a coincidence. It was a choice. There is no real difference, anymore.

He used the White Lotus gambit because the gardener told him to. He shook the man's hand, and he delivered their messages, and he broke into every place they told him to break into.

He stole messages and people and messages that looked like people, and he never complained to anyone but the sand.

They wanted him to wear a mask so he chose an old theatre character. He caught himself humming the theme under his breath a few times too often.

He wishes he had kept it because even if it was ridiculous Oma and Shu were damned if it hadn't made him feel invincible.

-

They can't arrest him for being Fire Nation, Zuko knows.

The tall man knows this as well. He brings Zuko into a small room, has an Earth Bender bind his left hand to the table, and tells him to sign a confession that calls him a spy. Something in Zuko's chest chokes on dirt.

Zuko gazes into the man's eyes, looks at the thing-that-might-once-have-been-earth hiding inside them and spits in the man's face. The man wipes the spittle off of his nose and flicks it onto the table.

Then the man, who is clearly more brimstone than anything else, how could Zuko _ever_ think otherwise, orders them all away.

The guard takes him back to his cell. They stop hitting him when he stops moving.

Zuko wonders if the king of the underworld dares to kill the mountain god.

-

He leaves the White Lotus when he wants to.

There isn't any particular turning point, only a sudden feeling that instructs him to go.

He wants, in a distant train of thought, to grow a garden.

They don't let him go easy. They think he has defected because they look at him and mistake his ashes for embers.

It does not matter.

Zuko burns his fingertips.

They are all blind, and will never _really_ know the difference.

-

When he was seven years old, Zuko's cousin Lu Ten helped him plant tea rose flowers in the Palace garden. For the turtleducks to gaze at.

Zuko has not cried for Lu Ten in years. The flowers burned in a game of chase. He can hardly remember why they ever meant anything at all.

Flowers do not grow in the wall cracks here. Rather, they bend for the wall, curl inward and upward, stretch their little hands towards the sky.

He cannot see them, but he can almost believe they are there. If he sinks far enough through the floor, he can hear them sing.

-

They do not control him, though he knows they could. He can see their lanterns, reflecting in old ghost stories. Someone said once that the technique doesn't work on Fire Benders.

They have not tried to puppet him yet, which means that they still believe Agni has not left him. That his god has not thrown him out of orbit, has not left him drifting, and wayward, and cold. Good. If they knew, they might realize he is something entirely Else then they think he is.

If only they could see the monkshood growing in the spaces between his bones. Maybe then they would understand.

-

He met the gardener in Gaoling. She took his hand when she saw him on the street. Looked into his one good eye _(It was gold then, Zuko thinks, bright polished gold. He doesn't know what it looks like now)_ and saw the words war-child in bright letters inside. Saw the bandages and let the word victim cloud her judgment.

She gave him food. She cleaned and wrapped his cuts. He never asked her why, and she never told him.

When he told her about the sun, she laughed and said she liked the stars.

Her mind ran on a different wave to the rest of the world; she felt like a thing out of orbit, too.

She guided his hands through a sword stroke.

He wishes he had more things about her to remember.

-

Zuko watches the bars of the window when the guard outside his door is not watching him. He wonders what it would feel like to breech the earth again.

To bloom.

He looks back down.

-

The bars were too big to ever hold him properly. It is no wonder he manages to slip between them, like water in cupped hands, dripping down and down and away.

The stormy night sky electrifies his skin. His blood smells like ozone. He does not say goodbye to Ba Sing Se, which might be why it comes back.

He is free for three days exactly.

They find him right before he gets out of the city. This time, they bury him deep within the dirt, under the ground where the sun does not rise or set or shine at all.

Despite the cold that settles in his bones, Zuko misses the rain.

-

The gardener once told Zuko that he only had to leave when he wanted to. She let him stay with her for so long, hole up in her house and root himself in her garden. She patted his shoulder and laughed when people asked where he came from.

She told him, once, that all flowers mean something different, something special. Pressed her guidebook into his hands when he didn't stop asking for the meaning of every flower in the garden. When he asked what the empty pages meant, she told him to figure it out.

She said that she was a rebel, once. Back when she was younger and less content with just _watching_ the Earth Kingdom burn.

He asked her who was burning the world now and she gave him a piece of flint.

-

Long Feng looks at him hard and steady and shoves the confession paper beneath his nose. Zuko breathes.

There are butterflies in his rib cage, landing in his lungs and nesting in his throat. He almost can't muster up the strength to say no.

Long Feng tells the soldiers to convince him.

How big, Zuko wonders as foot meets jaw meets floor meets fist, must the earthquake be, before the mountain crumbles?

The earth does not stop its shaking to inform him.

-

They leave him in a small room with a big man and a cold bucket of water and Zuko doesn't mean to sign the papers but he does.

Water from his hair, which seems to grow longer every time it falls in his face, drips onto the paper. Goodbye, water. Goodbye, goodbye.

Please do not come back.

He shivers when they take the paper away, though the ocean in his lungs has long since warmed. He folds his body in half and hides his face in his knees.

He tells his uncle sorry, as many times as he can. The tear tracks carve canyons down his face.

Even the mountain must bow at the feet of the tide.

-

They put him in a different cell.

It is small enough to press into Zuko's lungs, fill them up with stone. He breathes around it anyway.

He doesn't know if the burned-down-the-world part of him is bigger than the breathing-around-stone part of him. Doesn't know if anyone can see the first part, anymore.

Doesn't know, at least, until two guards come into his cell and one of them grabs him by the hair and asks his friend what they do with Fire Nation prisoners.

Down and down and down they go. The mountain god begins to understand why his portraits are always drawn kneeling.

-

Once, when he was a member of the White Lotus, Zuko went to the North Pole.

It was cold, is the primary thing Zuko remembers. It was cold in the way that withered flowers before they could breach the earth. That curled into everything it could sink its claws into.

He met the princess there. He wasn't supposed to; She wandered into his meeting with Grand Lotus Pakku. They exchanged only a glance and an introduction, and then she was gone.

He felt a pull in his chest, then. It screamed at him to not let her leave, to keep her safe.

He remembers Azula, who would walk the lines of the palace roof and dangle her feet off the edge, and he thinks that's what this feeling is.

He does not know what he would do if he saw her again. Is not even sure she would remember him. But if sweet basil ever grows in his lungs, if he ever has the space for it, he would give her that. It is supposed to mean good wishes. He would like her to be safe.

-

The next time Long Feng speaks to him, it is in a tiny room, tinier than even Zuko's cell. He is sat down (This time both hands are bound to the table) and he lets his head dip forward. He peers at Long Feng through the curtain of hair. He swears it wasn't this long last night.

He doesn't know what he is there for until Long Feng speaks.

"We don't ask for much," The king says. "Only information."

Zuko's fingers burn where they signed the confession. Regret makes him ill. Like the bad food, they serve in cheap Earth Kingdom inns. He tries to smile with his eyes but it spills, drips down to his lips and then, uncontrollably, he laughs.

He straightens his spine and for what might be the first time in his life understands what Azula liked about power. "Fuck you," He spits.

When they take him out of the room, he's still laughing. He was wrong about the flowers here. Nasturtium is growing in his footprints.

-

Maybe, Zuko thinks, he didn't lose his Fire Bending to the White Lotus. He felt it die so many times after. He tried to stamp it out when he was thirteen, begging on the street next to another child, with burns as bad as his and bare feet. She had money in her pail but not enough. He looked at her and realized that his country did that, that _his_ people burned her and starved her and hurt her (And in two days they would kill her but he didn't _know_ _that_ yet).

The ashes in his chest are cold. Sometimes, they smother the flowers.

-

He used to pray to Agni when he was young. With his mother, sometimes. More often with the hot desert sand.

He doesn't pray much, anymore. He curses by Oma and Shu as if the words have always been on his tongue, why would anyone ever think otherwise. Don't look too closely at the gold in his eyes, it's just the candle's reflection.

It's amazing how many things people can't see when they don't want to look.

-

He doesn't remember a lot of things, during that period where the world was big and small and empty. He was in solitary confinement for a long time, and they put food into his room when he was sleeping and never said a word.

Azula lurks in the corner of his vision. He doesn't want to think about her, so he tries not to look.

The gardener dances just out of reach. His chest aches and it spreads, and then everything is aching.

He is _so, so,_ cold. He thinks Agni would answer if he called.

He doesn't. He is afraid of the kind of love that a god of the pyre can offer. Or maybe he is afraid that he will get lost in it. That the mountain he's built for himself will become a volcano. Because what kind of flowers would grow there then?

-

The walls shrink, closing in and in and in. Zuko feels the flowers in his bones wither and rot. Azula stays in the corner and manages to get closer without really moving at all.

The gardener screams.

His mother leaves and her voice echoes around the stone walls. Echoes until it's a million voices, a cacophony of her telling him again and again _"Never forget who you are."_ And he's crying and screaming because he doesn't know if he remembers who that was in the first place.

-

Long Feng makes an offer, after some time (How much time, how long was he in there? _Too long. Goodbye, goodbye_ ).

"We can give you the items from your bag, the ones that were separated from you when you first arrived at Lake Laogai." He pauses and smiles. His teeth look like ivory. Zuko's lungs shrink. "With some exceptions, of course."

Zuko says nothing. His eyes travel down to the floor, where there is no ivory or brimstone at all. He wishes something was growing, but there isn't. He is the only thing here in need of protection.

"What would I have to do?"

Long Feng's smile grows and grows. He smiles with his teeth. Why must he do that?

Zuko is reminded of birds nest orchid, the flower that feeds off of Beech trees and never comes up for air. He cannot imagine Long Feng in any place other than deep underground.

Thinking of flowers makes him think of the gardener's book, nestled in his bag. His ribs ache and something in his stomach burns.

"Oh, it's simple, really. We understand you haven't been to the Fire Nation in quite a long while. So, this pertains to something more... recent. Based on the letter in your bag, I understand you had communication with what the Earth Kingdom believes is an anarchist cell. All we need is names. As many as you can remember."

The book is no help to him now. He's read it so many times he has callouses in the shape of the pictures. But still, he aches for it. Aches in a way he can hardly understand.

He wants, he wants, he wants.

The lump in the back of his throat builds to something that might be a sob.

He can't, he can't, he can't.

He hangs his head farther. Glares through the veil.

"Well?" Asks the orchid.

"I'm tired," Zuko says.

They take him back to his cell.

He thinks, at a distance, that he wants to grow a garden.

-

It was some time around winter when the gardener died.

He doesn't remember much besides the sickness, and the doctors, and the folklore. They thought it was just chest pains, at first.

The doctor called it jincan. Poison.

Zuko has been around the Earth Kingdom long enough, at this point, to recognize that when someone is given jincan there is only one group of people to hold responsible. Sitting somewhere up above him, higher than Agni himself.

He leaves a bundle of flowers at the headstone and hopes that she would understand.

Blackthorn and primrose and a single striped carnation.

They wrap around his bones, those flowers. They puppet his limbs and after they've taken control he can never find his way back.

He does not want to find his way back. He does not know what grows there now. And more than that he is afraid that whatever grows there might not know him either.

-

Zuko misses his mother sometimes. Misses her in a deep, aching kind of way. It's not like the way he misses the gardener.

The gardener's pain is sharper, like a claw in his chest. His mother is more like a fester; an old wound. Reopened again and again and again.

He misses Azula, too. In an odd, complex sort of way.

It all makes him feel weary and old, most days. Hobbling and grey. He aches down to his bones, in his marrow.

He is so _cold_.

-

The tide comes in and they move him to a new place.

He doesn't know what's going on, at first. They put drugs in his tea and he sleeps, for a nebulous amount of time. He wakes up in a new cell.

He feels like there is pine growing underneath his skin, prickling and bleeding him dry. He is in an interrogation room before he can shake off the sleep.

The man is taller than Zuko. Taller and more powerful, with the ocean at his fingertips.

A bucket of water. Chains. In the back of his mind, Zuko escapes down the drain pipes.  
Slips away, though the dripping of the water on his forehead still echoes in his ears. He screams at it. It wasn't supposed to come back.

They come back for him later. Years or days or hours later, it doesn't matter and he can't feel the sun setting, even though he could when he was young.

He hunches on the floor of his new cell, smaller and colder and taller than the other one, and for the last time in a long time, Zuko cries. Cries and sobs; wretching, heaving sobs that tear through his throat and leave his stomach aching.

He falls asleep looking up, at the skylight in the ceiling, stars reflecting off the copper tiled walls into his eyes. He closes them. He dreams of nothing at all.

-

As soon as he wakes up, Zuko tries to climb the walls.

He scrambles desperately, clawing at the smooth copper sheets, one hand and foot pressing into each side. He falls each time he tries.

He sits on his knees and prevents the building tears with the knowledge that he can still see the sky.

-

They bring him food, eventually. It's soup, and it's cold, and it's disgusting, but it's food so Zuko eats it. He sits in the Lotus position, legs crossed like he was taught to as a child, because some things do not leave you, no matter how much you want them to.

He looks down at his empty bowl through bleary vision. His legs have gotten thinner. He can see most of his bones.

Fir grows like chains around his ankles. He is bound to the floor. He tries to get up and finds that he cannot move a muscle.

-

He lost the knife Uncle gave him. When he was 14 years old and visiting Xi Yu. He used the word visiting when people asked what he was doing there, and he doesn't think a single person believed him, but they never pressed the issue so he didn't elaborate.

In reality, he just didn't know where to go.

He was three months away from meeting the White Lotus because he hadn't read the letter the gardener gave him before she died, so he was just searching.

He lost the knife in the crack between the food he stole and the chase between him and the man he stole it from. He tried to go back for it, later that night, but he couldn't find it.

He left Xi Yu the same way he left Gaoling, two months prior; Quickly and without looking back. Zuko can't afford to look back anymore.

-

They catch him when he tries to climb the wall again.

He's three feet off the ground when the guards walk in. They pull him down by his ankles and beat him until he can't feel anything but bruised.

Then, they put him in handcuffs. A guard grabs him by the hair and asks if he's ever going to try that again.

Zuko feels sick but more than that he feels scared. Scared down to his bones.

"No," He says.

"No, who?" The guard asks.

He swallows, and it scrapes down his throat like rusty nails. His mouth tastes like vomit. He didn't know pride was this bitter. "No, sir," He says weakly.

The guard laughs and laughs. He smiles like a carnivore with blood on his teeth.

Zuko keeps his gaze on the ground. He can almost sense the things growing down there, swimming in the dirt. Can nearly hear the bugs moving.

He breathes. In. Out.

If the sun rises, he cannot tell.

-

Zuko runs a hand over the copper plating, up and down, over and over. He digs in his nails. It does not move.

They take him to an almost empty room. A chair sits in the middle. The drains surrounding it are stained red. They give him a bucket and a rag and tell him to work.

There is fear and there is the feeling in Zuko's blood. He cleans the room. Scrubs it down, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. It takes a long time, he knows that much. The smell of iron lingers on his prison clothes. So does the stink of humiliation.

Maybe his father was right. Zuko is a coward.

He hugs his knees to his body and presses his back to the corner of his cell. The mattress beneath him is hard and bumpy but it's the best thing the room can offer.

If he trusts them, maybe the flowers will take him away.

-

The next job they give him is almost the same as the other one. Cleaning, again, but this time the cells aren't empty.

The first man grabs Zuko by the ear and tries to stab him with half a broken plate. The guards have him in seconds. Zuko doesn't want to know what happened next, and he doesn't think anyone would tell him if he asked.

The second one sits in the corner and rocks himself to sleep. He's singing a lullaby. Zuko's ears grate.

The guards sit outside of the cell. They play cards. Sometimes, they make bets, which Zuko knows because if the bets are about him, they'll say it.

"How long before _he's_ rocking himself to sleep at night, you think?" The first one, the one who likes to yank Zuko's hair and smile with his teeth, asks.

"Six copper pieces say it's a month, tops," The second one replies.

The first one says, "Eh, I'll give him two. I've got faith in him." They both laugh. "Hey, Ashmaker, you sleeping good?"

Both of them bare their teeth, like Spiderfly traps ready for their next meal.

If a mountain still resides within him, it has long since crumbled. And if there is any rubble left, it is only good for hiding.

Zuko continues to clean. His knees begin to ache and crumble. Perhaps this kind of story is the only one he's good for.

-

Some nights, he dreams of Azula.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts for a while so I figured I might as well edit it and get it out there. Might write the rest of the series, might not. I've started anti-depressants now, so hopefully, I'll be able to.
> 
> Also yes I stole a quote from Mulan what are you gonna do about it?
> 
> Comment to give my cat superstrength.


End file.
